


The House at Twilight

by ricinulei



Category: Natsume Yuujinchou | Natsume's Book of Friends
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-13
Updated: 2016-08-13
Packaged: 2018-08-08 11:42:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7756417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ricinulei/pseuds/ricinulei
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Right here, there’s something darker than darkness and colder than cold; it might as well be the Presence.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The House at Twilight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Merit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merit/gifts).



The house is all empty width, emptiness with its own weight, darkness where light can’t enter. Wind whistles in between the rooms; nobody lives here. Everything is old and lonely.

Even here, something is awake.

_Give—_

It’s not a voice, but a certainty that could be coming from inside your mind.

_Give!_

Right here, there’s something darker than darkness and colder than cold; it might as well be the Presence.

_Give me back my name!_

Suddenly, the Presence is right here, a formless blur striking out.

And Natsume awakes. Everything’s dark, but it’s just the normal dark in his room late at night, and he’s warm under his covers. He listens to Nyanko-sensei’s untroubled breathing until his own heart calms down. There’s nothing more one can do at these hours, so Natsume turns around and drifts slowly into sleep once more. The worry of another encounter with that dream—that thing—nips at his mind, but it feels silly to stay awake when tomorrow’s a school day and the danger is so unclear. He’d better do something before the Presence becomes a regular nightly visitor, though. Something like start looking into that house; the Presence seemed to be haunting it.

His trust is rewarded, and the nightmare doesn’t return that night.

 

* * *

 

“Well, how am I supposed to find this one particular house among all the others?” Nyanko-sensei asks, a bit petulantly. He’s perched on Natsume’s shoulder and lifts his head to sniff at the air. It’s a typical morning on the way to school, which means there’s nobody in this stretch of the road to gawk at Natsume and wonder why he’s talking to his cat.

Spring hasn’t yet settled in; everything feels washed out and uncertain. Soon, the sap will run strong and the vegetation will burst with vitality, dragging insects and birds—and humans—in its wake; the cold air will shatter into warmth. But not now.

“It was pretty roomy.” The details are hard to grasp now; like most dreams, its details have faded, and the rest feels unconvincing when spread out under the sunlight, like a dirty old sheet that looked like a ghost at midnight. He remembers wind and emptiness. A sense of isolation. “In the forest or the mountain, probably, not someplace where humans live.”

“Hmph. Well, that sure helps.” Nyanko-sensei shifts to scratch his cheek. Luckily, Natsume’s used to balancing a cat on his shoulder and doesn’t drop him. “Maybe it was just a dream. Didja think of it?”

“Sensei, you’re just being lazy.”

Nyanko-sensei snorts in disdain. “You—and more importantly, I—wouldn’t go through this bother if you just gave me the Book of Friends.”

Grumble as he might, Nyanko-sensei’s usually reliable. That evening, Natsume lingers on the way home, waiting to see a round brown-and-white shape bounce toward him; he smiles briefly when that happens.

“Over here,” is all Nyanko-sensei says, leaving Natsume to follow him out of the road and into the forest.

 _Here_ turns out to be more of a _there_. A way out _there_ , into the deeper forest, where the underbrush is thicker and you have to pick your way carefully if you don’t want to trip and fall.

“How much farther is it?” Natsume pushes a branch aside right before it can hit him across the eyes. It’s darker in here, thanks to the dense clumps of tree branches. He’d rather be out of the forest when the last of the light fades.

“Just a bit.”

Nyanko-sensei climbs up a nearby tree’s trunk, lightning-quick, and perches himself on a tall branch. Natsume grabs a lower branch and drags himself up, until he’s straddling the high branch and hugging the trunk.

“Now wait and see,” Nyanko-sensei adds helpfully, since there’s nothing to see other than the treetops near and far. In the distance, the forest slopes down and then up, climbing the ladder of the nearest mount; its shy pale green grows bolder with each day.

Natsume isn’t above questioning whatever Nyanko-sensei’s sources are in the youkai grapevine, and is considering doing so when something indeed happens.

A roof rises among the trees where nothing stood a second ago. It’s far, but it’s plainly the dark tiles and inverted v-shape of a traditional Japanese house.

Something tugs at the back of Natsume’s mind, the echo of a voice that was never spoken. Wide, empty corridors stand lonely.

“That’s it,” he whispers. “Good job, Nyanko-sensei.”

Nyanko-sensei preens. “But don’t rush in there. Wait and see.”

So Natsume does, resting his cheek on the rough sun-warmed bark that smells of sap. A shiny black beetle rushes past his splayed fingers. Deep in the forest, a bird tweets unconcerned, and a second one answers. A slight breeze drifts through his hair and sends the leaves rustling.

The sun is now gone and only its golden echo remains in the leaves.

“I really don’t want to be late.” Natsume readjusts his grip so his leg won’t fall asleep. “Touko-san will worry.”

“Yes, dinner,” Nyanko-sensei allows. “We’ll be in time for dinner. See? There.”

The house is gone.

 

* * *

 

“Nobody knows much about that place,” Nyanko-sensei explains as he polishes up his second bowl of gyuudon in the privacy of Natsume’s room. “It shows up at dusk, it goes away before nightfall. Nobody ever comes out. It’s better to just ignore it.”

Natsume’s eyes skim his finished homework without really looking at it and he closes his notebook with a slap. “But Reiko didn’t.”

Nyanko-sensei flops on his back. “No, it wasn’t her style to let sleeping dogs lie.” He waves a paw accusingly. “I had to traipse around the forest all day! You better appreciate it.”

 

* * *

 

The empty hall rises again, dark and lonely. Nothing has changed from the last night, except that Natsume knows for sure there’s more to it than a dream. There’s someone with a genuine grievance, too.

“Where are you? I want to return your name, but I don’t even know what it _is_.”

Rather than staying and being helpful, the Presence attacks him again. As before, Natsume’s response is to jolt himself awake. If only he could’ve stayed and tried to reason with the Presence—but that probably isn’t a very good idea, after all. Somehow, facing a supernatural being face-to-face feels safer than letting it into his dreams.

This’ll get exhausting if it keeps happening night after night, too. Maybe even dangerous; he doesn’t know. Good thing he’s going to solve this matter for good.

Two pinpricks of light are turned toward him.

“You awake?” Natsume asks.

“Hmph! You disturbed my sleep with all that tossing and turning.” The spots of light disappear.

Natsume goes back to sleep in a house where there are no Presences.

 

* * *

 

Natsume isn’t exactly lying when he tells the Fujiwaras he’ll be late for dinner because he’ll be staying at a friend’s place—but that kind of spin on the truth almost counts as a lie. He doesn’t care for going through classes feeling like expired milk sits on his stomach, though, so he banishes the guilt away.

Now, he follows Nyanko-sensei’s fluffy round tail as the cat slinks silently through the underbrush. The birds shut up until the crashing noise of Natsume’s passing has faded. This house sure is out of the way. Was that the intention of its builders, or just a side effect of time?

When they reach the place where the house should appear, Natsume’s starting to get winded up with all that rushing through uneven ground and climbing uphill. He stops to catch his breath for a second, lowering his head; when he lifts it, the house’s already there.

As unwelcoming as it looks now, you can see it used to be pretty stately back in the day, in a rustic, hope-you-don’t-like-running-water-that-much way. (Was running water even a thing when it was built?) There should be a wall and some sort of gardens surrounding the house—or rather, there were once, but were lost and didn’t materialize back.

“Well, here we are.” Nyanko-sensei scurries up the front steps.

Natsume follows him and slides open the door. A gust of humid, cold air that smells of compost hits him in the face. He stands on the doorway for a moment, waiting for his eyes to get used to the gloom that covers everything beyond the small rectangle of light where his shadow falls. It doesn’t happen—

_darkness where light can’t enter_

—so Natsume just steps inside, followed gingerly by Natsume-sensei. The hall feels impossibly big, as if the walls had vanished and the darkness reached to the ends of the universe. To reassure himself there’s light left in the world, Natsume turns to the open door.

It’s closed now.

“Figures,” he says, unsurprised.

“Oh, yeah,” Nyanko-sensei says from the general location of Natsume’s feet. “The house did that. I had forgotten, seeing how I was smart enough not to enter the first time.”

“That’s insulting you as much as me,” Natsume says just to hear something against the silence. This is nothing he can’t handle, though. He holds his satchel closer; inside’s the Book of Friends, his one bargaining chip.

Quick, now. He has to find the Presence before the house fades away.

Natsume walks a few steps in a random direction—they’re all the same, since he can’t see. He feels for a wall or door and finds only air, so thick with age and decay and humidity he feels he’s breathing in spores.

_emptiness with its own weight_

But this isn’t a nightmare.

Natsume steps on something that squiggles under his foot, and retreats so fast he’s left wondering if he imagined the whole thing. Surely a lizard or a huge centipede—or worse, a rat. But it’s hard to picture anything at all living in this place. There’s no cobwebs anywhere, for starters.

Where does the house go when it fades, anyway?

Natsume instantly regrets making himself that question.

“Hey, I’ve come to return your name!”

Nothing answers. Not a surprise, either. If Natsume has to guess, the Presence is waiting. It has to know he’s here. His left hand grips his satchel’s handle tighter.

He almost walks into a doorjamb. The door itself has fallen from its hinges and become another source of moldy stink. Natsume steps over it and is punched in the nostrils by a strong, coppery smell. This room is smaller, more enclosed; he feels around and his right hand touches cool, slimy metal. The kitchens?

Something hard collides with his foot and trips him; Natsume falls on his hands and knees but stands up almost immediately, not wanting to be in contact with the floor if he can help it.

It’s only then that he starts missing Nyanko-sensei. Natsume had assumed the cat was there all along, as invisible as anything else. Maybe not?

“Sensei?” Natsume waits for an answer. None comes. “Sensei?” Not that he thinks Nyanko-sensei is in danger or anything. But the house’s getting to Natsume. Maybe the Presence’s trying to isolate him so it can get its hands on the Book of Friends all the easier. Or trying to waste his time, so night falls and he’s still there—but that’s why he must get to the end of this right now.

In the next room there’s a mold-encased staircase. Natsume’s first impulse is to climb it, feeling that the Presence must live upstairs for some reason, but the first step feels almost rotten. Better not risk it. Instead, Natsume turns to the right.

Rotten wood doesn’t creak. It bends under his weight before he can tell what’s happening, and the next thing he knows, the floor shatters under his feet and he’s falling through the darkness, falling into a bottomless well on top of another bottomless well. He hits something hard and his breath is knocked out of his lungs, and it still feels like he’s falling. He hugs his satchel tightly.

Something—a ten-ton bowling ball?—falls on his stomach.

“Idiot! You walk outside my sight and the first thing you do is fall into the basement!”

Natsume frees a hand from the angry bowling ball’s weight and runs it over Nyanko-sensei’s fur until it stops standing on end. Nothing really hurts, but Natsume’s still dazed. “Good thing I found you!”

“Well, hurry up!” Nyanko-sensei jumps off Natsume, kicking his stomach ungently in the process. “This house isn’t going to stay here all day.”

Natsume closes his eyes—it makes no difference—and rubs them. Nope, still dazed. “Coming.”

When he opens his eyes, a light shape hovers for a second at the edges of his vision, by the far left, partially hidden by a wooden pillar. A second later, everything’s just as dark as before. But it’s not just the result of rubbing his eyes. He knows. He’s met that Presence before.

Okay, downstairs rather than upstairs. Close enough.

“Sensei?” Natsume does his best to sound casual. He stands up and pats dust out of his clothes as an excuse to stay close to the last place he saw the Presence.

The cat is paying attention; it makes Natsume’s skin crawl. Maybe Nyanko-sensei failed to notice the Presence first, but he’s zoning on to it now.

“On my left,” Natsume says. A rush of wind brushes past him. Instantly, someone screams, followed by angry cat noises and a light shape hitting the floor.

“That’s enough, sensei.” Natsume thinks he can hear an answering _Hmph!_

Just like that, the surroundings lighten up as if somebody flicked a switch. Except this light has no source; it comes from all around. Natsume blinks a couple of times as his eyes get used to being needed again. By the right—hiding behind another pillar—there’s a pale spindly form. They gaze at Natsume in astonishment; their one eye not covered by their matted hair is brimming with tears. They wring their thin hands over their yukata-clad lap.

“I thought you were _her_ ,” they say, their voice trembling, “but you’re not, and I—I’ve made a terrible mistake.”

Nyanko-sensei grumbles, glaring at them. There’s a clump of matted hair under his paw.

Natsume hasn’t dropped his satchel with all the commotion. “It’s a common mistake,” he adds before they start crying or something.

“For those who never were close to humans,” they say forlornly.

Wait.

Of course.

“You’re the spirit of this house, aren’t you?”

 

* * *

 

A girl in a school uniform with an ofuda-reinforced bat slung over her shoulder stands in front of the house.

Reiko may not be the most sociable person, but she’s become good at picking up interesting things. Like the two girls in the class next to hers she overheard talking about this haunted house deep in the forest, not that they think it’s anything more than a town legend or anything. And that old lady at the train station, who mentions her grandma telling her about a stately house burning down when grandma was a child. Of course, just because there was a house once, last century or so, it doesn’t mean there’s something more to it. But Reiko doesn’t like to make assumptions, not even when her first explorations fail to reveal any houses.

In the end, her hunch was correct in a slightly different way: the reason why almost nobody has seen the house is that it can be seen only for a short while every day. Most people, she guesses, wouldn’t even get to see that much. Maybe just a feeling of abandonment that seems to come out of nowhere and makes them rush back home.

Satisfied with her finding, Reiko times in the back of her mind how long it takes for the house to fade. It’s enough for her. The next day, she stands at the main doors.

The house must’ve noticed her already. She’s counting on it. There’s a reason why this spirit keeps coming back every day. Houses are meant to be inhabited. Whoever lived here left and didn’t turn back when the house burned down. Maybe they decided the isolation wasn’t worth the bother, or got tired of the mountain, or simply couldn’t afford to rebuild it. But the house lingers.

Reiko slides the door open. Decay hasn’t yet settled in, but neglect is thick on the air. The velvety gloom isn’t as absolute as it will become one day. Besides, Reiko isn’t afraid of the dark. The dark is full of fascinating things, and if you try to avoid every risk you’ll miss out.

That day, Reiko leaves the house with a new name in her book. The principle of the thing is what really matters, but she finds herself returning to that house every once in a while. The spirit follows her nervously as Reiko walks from one room to the other. Every trace of the former owners went out with the fire, but so did the damage of the fire itself; this house made itself from the ground up. That’s an useful skill, as Reiko knows.

One day, Reiko doesn’t come back. It’s nothing personal. And of course, she keeps the name she earned fair and square. What did you expect?

 

* * *

 

“A wimp like that shouldn’t mess with people’s dreams,” Nyanko-sensei grumbles as he bounces down the front steps.

It’s pretty dark already. Luckily, the moon’s out; that should be enough to reach more civilized ground without falling on a hole somewhere. “I guess they can stay longer if they want to,” Natsume muses. “Maybe they just like to watch the setting sun.”

Nyanko-sensei doesn’t dignify that comment with an answer.

The house lingers behind a moment more; then, moonlight falls where its bulk used to rise. At first, the open space feels impossibly empty, but soon it’s hard to believe anything ever existed in that place. Wasn’t it just an empty patch among the trees from the beginning?

Upon a closer inspection, though, you can see the blackened and sooty remains of foundations under the overgrown weeds, barely.

“Sleep well,” Natsume says.


End file.
